Local storyteller returning to museum

Award-winning storyteller Gladys Coggswell returns Wednesday, May 8, to the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum to resume her performances of Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It.”

Award-winning storyteller Gladys Coggswell returns Wednesday, May 8, to the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum to resume her performances of Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It.”Coggswell will give performances at 10 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. most Wednesdays through Saturdays until October at the museum gallery.Coggswell’s performances are free with museum admission thanks to annual grant money from the Missouri Arts Council. This year, the Missouri Humanities Council will help fund her performances for the first time.The museum’s storyteller-in-residence performs as “Aunt Rachel,” a former slave whose real name was Mary Ann Cord, a household servant in Elmira, N.Y.One evening, Mary Ann recalled her life as a slave and the sorrow of being torn apart from her husband and children on the auction block to Twain. Twain wrote her story and published it in the Atlantic Monthly in 1874.